[7][18] Speaking to The New Republic writer Jo Livingstone in 2018, he said he had checked the screenshots against his own account and found they didn't match; he called Yiannopoulos a "harmful troll", but said he had been in contact with him on "a Wikipedia-related scandal".
"[5] The New Republic noted an at times "unfeeling tone", but concluded Bitwise was a "valuable resource for readers seeking to understand themselves in this new universe of algorithms, as data points and as human beings.
"[6] Kirkus Reviews described Auerbach as "the rare engineer who is also conversant with literature and philosophy, both of which he brings to bear on interpreting his experiences as a builder of these thinking machines and the heuristics and languages that guide them", and called the book an "eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations".
Auerbach opines that meganets are contributing to a "severe fracturing of society" as users split into "like‑minded self‑policing groups that enforce unanimity and uniformity, and prevent any larger‑scale societal consensus", a process also inherently self‑reinforcing.
[22] Auerbach suggests that one solution to the current problems that meganets generate is to intentionally impair the algorithms that "track people demographically and pair like with like" so that local homogeneity and the accompanying doctrinaire attitudes are hindered.